Writing

When it comes to writing, I like facing new challenges. Trying something I’ve never tried before. Figuring out how to put the pieces together and make it work. It’s exciting. It’s thrilling. Sometimes I’ll just invent some challenge to overcome, for no other reason than it seems like fun. Right now I’m facing an enjoyable challenge. As mentioned in a previous post, I’m putting together an anthology of comic stories. Not comic as in funny, comic as in illustrated fiction. The challenge of taking these plots, pacing them out so they work in a mere eight pages, working with the artists, scripting the stories, getting the balance of elements right … It’s a thrill. When stuff clicks and it all falls into place, it’s like…Read more

The first time you taste possum you begin to question if this is what you really want to be doing with your time. It’s got a gritty taste, like lamb rubbed down with sandpaper, and the scent. Well, no amount of cheap whiskey or vomit will wash that out of your mouth. So needless to say, it makes you begin to question the choices you’ve made. Thing is, when the rails catch up to you, eventually you’ll eat whatever you can find. It was somewhere in Tennessee, I think — the details are still a little foggy — but it was the first bite I’d had since leaving Kentucky and besides, if you find someone on the tracks will to share his dinner you don’t…Read more

Writing about Neil Gaiman’s Sandman the last few weeks has reminded me of how envious I am of him. Not in a BAD way, mind you. Rather, in the way that makes you more eager than ever to bust your ass and create things until the world sits up, takes notice, and says, “Okay, good. You can live your life doing this full time.” Here’s a guy who was allowed to create something that afforded him the ability to write pretty much any kind of story he wanted to write. Horror. Fantasy. Adventure. Mythology. Romance and historical and crime and drama and a hundred other things. This when he first broke into comics. When he was a totally unknown quantity. And he took it, and…Read more

So hey, my buddy Jim and I wrote a book. We think it’s pretty good. You ought to buy it. It’s available for preorder at Amazon and a gajillion other retailers, and it officially set for release in April. This isn’t a self-publishing venture. The book is due out in April through Scarecrow Press, a notable publisher of scholarly tomes and the like. So hey, that’s pretty swell. We’re very happy. It’s funny, in the more than two years since we wrote it (we began in January 2006), we’ve come across at least three bloggers who were going to attempt the same thing, i.e. watching every Alfred Hitchcock film in a year and writing about each one. Two of them barely got started before their project…Read more